The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a design approach for building complex applications e.g. in the telecommunications and service provider industries. NFV virtualizes network functions into building blocks that may be connected, i.e. chained together to create services. A virtualized network function (VNF), may comprise one or more virtual machines (VM) running various software and processes. The same virtualized platform that supports provisioning machines into VNFs, may also support programming virtualized network devices and flows to support VNFs. The programming of virtualized network devices and flows to support VNFs is the domain of software defined networking (SDN).